Love Poems

realiz · Fri Jan 27, 2012 12:26 pm

Here is another one about love and loss.

Snowshoe to Otter Creek
1975 Stacie Cassarino
love lasts by not lasting
—Jack Gilbert

I’m mapping this new year’s vanishings:
lover, yellow house, the knowledge of surfaces.
This is not a story of return.
There are times I wish I could erase
the mind’s lucidity, the difficulty of Sundays,
my fervor to be touched
by a woman two Februarys gone. What brings the body
back, grieved and cloven, tromping these woods
with nothing to confide in? New snow reassumes
the circleting trees, the bridge above the creek
where I stand like a stranger to my life.
There is no single moment of loss, there is
an amassing. The disbeliever sleeps at an angle
in the bed. The orchard is a graveyard.
Is this the real end? Someone shoveling her way out
with cold intention? Someone naming her missing?

Saffron · Fri Jan 27, 2012 2:01 pm


	realiz wrote: Here is another one about love and loss. Snowshoe to Otter Creek 1975 Stacie Cassarino love lasts by not lasting —Jack Gilbert

Thanks for posting! I really like the image and feel evoked by the lines:
There is no single moment of loss, there is
an amassing. The disbeliever sleeps at an angle
in the bed.

I also really like:
There are times I wish I could erase
the mind’s lucidity, the difficulty of Sundays,
my fervor to be touched
by a woman two Februarys gone.

These lines captures why it can be hard to let go when the mind is able to remember with such clarity and intensity and the feeling of loss is just that - intense rememberings accompanied by longing.

giselle · Fri Jan 27, 2012 9:49 pm


	realiz wrote: I like The Owl You Heard. I wondered about these lines: At such a strangely late hour in life Deepening the smell of green in Eden. You heard the sky of stars and, I am no longer human

I reflected on these lines a bit too. I wondered if the poem has an undertone of death to it. I think owl imagery does appear in the death context in poetry and fiction sometimes and the reference to 'strangely late hour' and 'no longer human' could possibly hint at this. My first thoughts about 'no longer human' were more in line with loss of love though and I am more inclined to that interpretation. I think the ambiguity of these lines in 'The Owl You Heard' and perhaps an overall ambiguity and uncertainty in the poem, that starts out with the first couple lines where it is 'not' an owl, I think hints at the difficulties and ambiguities that we can face sometimes in loving relationships.

On 'Snowshoe to Otter Creek', which I really like, the line that jumps out at me is "the bridge above the creek where I stand like a stranger to my life." Like a stranger to my life - what a great way to express a profound sense of loss.

Saffron · Wed Feb 15, 2012 6:46 am

This poem is a day late, but not a dollar short.

I Love You Sweatheart

A man risked his life to write the words.
A man hung upside down (an idiot friend
holding his legs?) with spray paint
to write the words on a girder fifty feet above
a highway. And his beloved,
the next morning driving to work…?
His words are not (meant to be) so unique.
Does she recognize his handwriting?
Did he hint to her at her doorstep the night before
of “something special, darling, tomorrow”?
And did he call her at work
expecting her to faint with delight
at his celebration of her, his passion, his risk?
She will know I love her now,
the world will know my love for her!
A man risked his life to write the words.
Love is like this at the bone, we hope, love
is like this, Sweatheart, all sore and dumb
and dangerous, ignited, blessed – always,
regardless, no exceptions,
always in blazing matters like these: blessed.

Thomas Lux

What grabbed me about this poem: The writer's uses of the word bone toward the end of the poem caught my attention. For me using the word bone to indicate depth and or intensity causes me an immediate visceral reaction - I'm hooked.

Penelope · Wed Feb 15, 2012 9:47 am

A man risked his life to write the words.

And it could be a futile gesture because his romantic intensity would frighten her off if she didn't feel the same passion.

No one took such a risk for me, although a man once put a message in the 'personal' column of a national newspaper, risking his wife seeing it. :lol:

oblivion · Fri Feb 17, 2012 2:50 pm

Okay, I'm back home here. Sorry for the absence.
I just wanted to mention that one of his collections is called "Pecked to Death by Swans".....I haven't read it but I adore the title. I think it is similar to his use of "bone" that you were talking about. Very catchy.

Saffron · Sat Feb 18, 2012 8:36 am


	oblivion wrote: Okay, I'm back home here. Sorry for the absence. I just wanted to mention that one of his collections is called "Pecked to Death by Swans".....I haven't read it but I adore the title. I think it is similar to his use of "bone" that you were talking about. Very catchy.

I will have to go looking for "Pecked to..." I could not find the poem online. Maybe my library system has the book. I want to post another by Lux, here is one that is appropriate for this thread:

A Kiss

One wave falling forward meets another wave falling
forward. Well-water,
hand-hauled, mineral, cool, could be
a kiss, or pastures
fiery green after rain, before
the grazers. The kiss — like a shoal of fish whipped
one way, another way, like the fever dreams
of a million monkeys — the kiss
carry me — closer than your carotid artery — to you.

DWill · Sat Feb 18, 2012 9:28 am


	oblivion wrote: Okay, I'm back home here. Sorry for the absence. I just wanted to mention that one of his collections is called "Pecked to Death by Swans".....I haven't read it but I adore the title. I think it is similar to his use of "bone" that you were talking about. Very catchy.

Welcome back! You were missed. I have to agree with you that the title of the collection is most unusual, very strange indeed.

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